


wild thing [me and you part 2]

by batty_lite



Series: me and you [2]
Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Emotional Infidelity, M/M, Patrick may or may not have a thing for panties and it's very much relevant, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:47:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22727878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batty_lite/pseuds/batty_lite
Summary: The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. ... He didn't think much of his chances. More than likely he'd become so bored as the hours crawled by that one day he'd simply forget to breathe. Then maybe people would get to wondering why such a fine young lad had perished in his prime. It would become a celebrated mystery... -The Thief of Always,Clive Barker
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Series: me and you [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634302
Comments: 23
Kudos: 21
Collections: Be My Peterick Valentine 2020





	wild thing [me and you part 2]

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentine's Day! Or, er... 
> 
> (This probably (?) makes more sense if you've read _backyard to backyard_ since the two are parallel to each other but it's not required reading.)

2002 

Patrick’s high school girlfriend breaks up with him the weekend before Valentine’s Day. She calls the house phone and tells him they just don’t see each other outside of class anymore. Patrick sits on the kitchen tile with his back to the wall and the cord twisted around his thumb, and blinks back tears. 

“We can still be friends,” she says at the end of the call. 

Patrick gives a shaky nod before he realizes she can’t see him through the phone. “Okay,” he says quietly.“Sorry about all this.” 

“No, it’s okay,” she replies, and then, “Hey, um— you aren’t seeing someone else, are you?” 

Patrick is mortified. 

“No?” It comes out whiny, probably obvious that he’s been crying.

“Oh, okay.” A short pause. “I’m sorry. It just kind of seemed like you were. Sorry again, um— I’ll see you on Monday.”

The phone call is thoroughly traumatizing, and as it turns out, it is hard to be friends with anyone after they’ve seen your penis and at least kind of liked it. They don’t talk. 

There’s a band practice on Valentine’s Day and Pete shows up an hour early with flowers. Pete is wearing a lime green puffer coat and an awkward grin and he shoves the roses at Patrick’s chest, and says, “These are for you.”

“Who gave you these?” Patrick’s mom asks him later. She’s teasing, and it’s clear that the right answer is, _a girl from school,_ or _the girl who broke up with me a week before Valentine’s Day, the one you liked._

Patrick looks up at her over the rims of his glasses and stabs at his dinner. “They’re from Pete,” he says causally. 

Her only response is a noncommittal, “Hmm.” She shifts uncomfortably and makes a disapproving face at the flowers and it feels a little like a kick to the chest.

Patrick isn’t sure his mom likes Pete. Their friendship is a point of contention, and Pete’s usual tricks don’t work on her. She doesn’t like leaving them alone together, doesn’t let Pete stay past eleven, and makes Joe drive Patrick home from practices. Patrick glances at his mother, inhales, and prepares to lie right to her disapproving face. 

“I need to go pack, I’m sleeping over at Joe’s.” 

“Just Joe’s?” 

Patrick looks up expecting to meet her eyes, but she’s considering an envelope in her hands instead. He feels his face flush cold, and he chews once before replying. “Yeah.” 

He doesn’t feel bad for lying later, draped over Pete’s thighs on Pete’s ripped couch, fleece blanket pulled over the both of them. It’s late, almost two, and Patrick is giggly, sleep deprived from staying up too late and getting up too early every day over the past week. 

“My girlfriend broke up with me,” Patrick tells him, grinning. He feels drunk, but all he’s had to drink is Sprite, and the crust of Pete’s freezer pizza, which Pete had fed him after eating the cheese off of it. 

“Fucking boo,” Pete replies, grinning. He touches Patrick’s hip, tucked under the waistband of his jeans, with cold fingers and Patrick stares at him, dazed, for a moment before he laughs. Pete shoves the hair from Patrick’s forehead to the side and asks, “Does that mean I can do this?” 

Pete kisses him. It tastes exactly how Patrick remembers 2002, like salt and soda and a little sweaty, Pete’s body unbelievably close and his mouth even closer. Pete touches Patrick’s lower lip with his thumb between them, soft and questioning, and Patrick lets his mouth fall open, wraps his hand around the back of Pete’s neck, and pulls him closer. It’s Valentine’s day, and Patrick is making out with Pete. 

“Hey, uh—” Patrick starts after a moment. Pete makes an obvious glance towards Patrick’s mouth and wipes at Patrick’s cheek with one finger, and Patrick’s breath sticks in his throat. “My mom is going away next week,” he says finally. “We can hang out at my house.” 

Pete makes a curious face, eyes glittering, before he says, “She knows you’re over here, you know. She’s not dumb.”

Patrick laughs. “So?”

“So maybe you should be more careful about sneaking around.”

Patrick is momentarily offended. He feels the corner of his mouth twitch downwards, and he prepares to shove Pete off of him and crawl to the other end of the couch. _I’m only sneaking around so you’ll like me, dumbass,_ Patrick thinks, but then Pete presses his mouth to Patrick’s ear and mumbles, “You can sleep upstairs with me tonight.”

It tickles, and Patrick shoves Pete’s head away from his face and laughs. Pete shoves the palm of his hand over Patrick’s mouth and whispers, “Shh, don’t tell!” 

Patrick strips fully nude before he climbs into bed next to Pete. He’s (almost) a legal adult, and he can make his own decisions.

2004

Sometime in the last week of January, Pete sits on the couch of his parent’s basement with Patrick sat between his knees. Pete runs his hand through Patrick’s hair and Patrick balances a can of orange Fanta on the carpet and sighs. 

“There’s a thing in Nashville we have to go to,” Pete tells the room.

“A _thing?"_ Joe asks, incredulous. “We don’t even get to know what it is?”

“Come on,” Pete insists. Pete’s fingernails scratch at the back of Patrick’s neck and Patrick leans his face against the inside of Pete’s thigh. “There’s a guy I want to talk to.” 

There’s a tense lull in the room before Andy says, in disbelief, “A _guy?_ What kind of guy?” 

Joe laughs. “Man, I’m not fucking getting in a car with you for longer than an hour for at least a year.”

No one asks Patrick. Patrick goes to Nashville, and halfway to Nashville, Pete holds his hand out expectantly in the front seat and asks, “Gas money?”

Patrick shoves his hand away. “No, I don’t have any fucking gas money. I don’t have money for anything, stop fucking asking me that.” 

“I know,” Pete says, grinning. “I’ve bought you dinner three times this week.” 

They’d eaten curled into each other on the couch in the apartment, Top Gun and Monty Python and The Truman Show twice in one night, and Patrick had spent most of the night staring at the soft spot under Pete’s right ear and wordlessly daring him to kiss him. He can still feel Pete’s bony hips in the flesh of his shoulder. 

Patrick crosses his arms over his chest and snaps, “Your _mom_ bought me dinner, _fuck_ _off!_ ” 

They spend the night in a Marriott outside Indianapolis on the way back, but they don’t sleep. They order take-out, which Pete pays for, and eat sprawled across the floor, toes touching between them.

_To be old and wise, you first must be young and stupid_ , Pete’s fortune cookie reads. He pockets the tiny slip of paper and lays back against the dirty carpet. 

“Are you doing anything on Saturday?” Patrick asks. Saturday is Valentine’s Day, two words that Patrick is currently refusing to say. 

From the carpet, Pete shrugs and Patrick watches his body with feigned disinterest. 

“I don’t know,” Pete replies. “She’s been hinting she wants to do something, but—”

Patrick opens his box of rice and asks suddenly, “Do you even like her?”

Pete shrugs again. “I don’t know— it’s like, you know when you really want something, and then you get it, and then you’re just like, ‘now what?’ It’s like that.”

Patrick swallows around his fork and says, very carefully, “Yeah— I get that.” 

After a moment, Pete bolts upright and announces, “Actually, I think I might just take a break from girls.” 

Patrick’s rice suddenly tastes like gasoline and feels like eating aquarium rocks. He stabs his plastic fork deep into the container and trips over his own teeth saying, “We should just drive back tonight— not waste the whole day tomorrow, y’know?” 

Patrick falls soundly asleep in the passenger seat to a cassette tape of Midnight Oil on one side and World Party on the other. He puts his glasses in the cup holder and the seatbelt leaves a line on his cheek, and Pete says, to only the other cars on the highway and no  one in particular, “I still have a crush on you.”

2005

It’s only days after the Gas Station Incident, where Pete had shoved him up against the brick wall of a Shell station and given him the worst kiss of his life (not that he has much to compare it to), and Patrick is commiserating with himself outside of a Dunkin Donuts bathroom. They aren’t on speaking terms, andPatrick stares at the three coffees cradled in his arms and thinks sullenly that February in Connecticut is miserable. 

Pete emerges from the bathroom after a moment, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans. The hand dryer drones behind him and Pete grimaces before he says, “Sorry.” 

It’s 6 AM and Patrick is not awake enough to mull over the implications of Pete’s half-assed apology. Patrick stares at him in disbelief for a moment, because they never apologize to each other; they just ignore each other until they’re bored of giving each other the cold shoulder. Patrick blinks and sidesteps the apology entirely. “For what,” he snaps. 

“Just— I don’t know, for making things weird the other day.” 

Patrick rolls his eyes. “It’s fine. Can you just take your coffee?” 

Pete sounds tired. “Which is mine?” 

“They’re all the same,” Patrick says quietly, and Pete takes a coffee from Patrick’s arms in silence.

It’s fine, until Patrick opens the box Pete had given him for Valentine’s Day and pulls out a pair of women’s underwear, red and soft and trimmed with lace. The fabric catches on the callouses on Patrick’s fingers and Patrick flushes red, the same crimson color as the panties he holds in his hands. 

“You’re so annoying! How are you so fucking annoying?” Patrick snarls. The initial anger is already wearing off, quickly being replaced by something like curiosity and sexual frustration. Patrick panics. 

Pete laughs and grins at him with shark teeth and playful eyes, and Patrick’s thoughts sound like television static. 

“It’s not funny!”Patrick says shrilly. 

“It’s a little bit funny,” Joe says, and rips open his bag of Hershey’s Kisses. Pete beams.

Patrick doesn’t know why he keeps them. They live in the bottom of the side pocket of his backpack, a dirty secret, and Patrick shivers every time he sees the red fabric peeking out from under packages of guitar strings, his wallet, the water bottle he keeps in that pocket.

2006

After the first night, they stick together like chewed up gum. Melting together on hot tarmac, stuck to chairs and the underside of bar counters, and Patrick snaps his gum against the roof of his mouth and watches Pete’s ass as he hauls his suitcase up the narrow hotel staircase. 

They waste no time with the deadbolt and their clothing in the room, and Pete fingers him on the hotel bed, still in his t-shirt and lying across Pete’s bare chest, and afterwards, Patrick sits across Pete’s hips and holds Pete’s hands in his. 

“Hey,” Pete mumbles, words slurring together through the afterglow and Patrick’s weight across his hips. “Remember those red panties?” 

They’re virtually shameless with each other, whatever Patrick wants, Patrick gets, so Patrick twitches an eyebrow and replies, “Yeah.” 

He’s cautious, though, and Pete stares at the plaster ceiling and thinks for a moment before he carefully says, “I would buy you another pair.” He slides his palms down Patrick’s sides to cup the round of his ass and Patrick considers Pete’s lower lip with dark eyes. 

Patrick wants to say no, or better yet, _fuck off and die, Pete,_ but instead, with Pete’s hands still on his ass, Patrick admits, “I still have them,” and hopes it sounds appealing. He shifts his weight slightly on Pete’s hips and feels Pete’s cock twitch against his ass. 

Pete lets his head fall back against the pillow, eyes closed. “Oh my God, do not tell me that.” 

Patrick bites his bottom lip and rolls his hips back against Pete’s half-hard cock, almost laughing. Pete slides his thumb into him and Patrick laughs and gasps and folds himself into Pete’s chest, his face in Pete’s neck. 

“Maybe I’ll wear them for you sometime,” Patrick whispers against Pete’s ear, before he kisses him. 

The Friday show is Valentine’s Day, and after the show, girls, and a couple of guys, shower Pete with homemade heart-shaped cards and love letters and candy. Pete smiles at all of them and signs CDs and arms and shoes, and Patrick’s stomach twists with jealousy, and not because he wants love notes and paper hearts. 

“Hi,” someone asks. “Can you sign this?” 

It’s a picture of he and Pete, ripped out of a magazine, and Patrick bites the cap off the end of a Sharpie marker with trembling hands and grits out, “Yep.” 

After the Saturday show, Pete slides his hands into the back of Patrick’s jeans, Patrick’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and gets a handful of lace. 

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Pete says quickly, and snatches his hand away like he’s been burned.

“Were you joking? Because I only—” It feels like being stabbed in the chest, and Patrick swallows the embarrassment and tries to be angry. 

“No— so not fucking joking,” Pete tells him thickly, grabs Patrick’s face in one hand, and kisses him deep and filthy. “Let’s, uh— let’s do this somewhere else.”

Pete pulls the panties around Patrick’s thighs and bites at Patrick’s lower back in the bathroom backstage. Pete fucks him with tongue and fingers and Patrick presses his face and the head of his cock into the cold metal divider of the bathroom stall and shoves his thumb in his mouth to stifle the _more_ on his tongue. In the aftermath, Pete grins at him and Patrick beams in his hands, loose and shiny and glowing with childish naivety. 

Patrick stuffs the panties in the pocket of Pete’s hoodie, blushing. Whatever cocaine feels like, it can’t be as smooth as this.

2007

In a strange peak of confidence and after a couple of times hanging out, Patrick asks her out, for Valentine’s Day. She says yes and Patrick feels like he’s won— won whatever stupid game he’s been playing with Pete, who fucks with Patrick after shows and in hotels and fucks with an equal number of girls and the occasional guy every other night of the week. Patrick stares at the blue rings around his eyes and the zit from his glasses in the mirror and tells himself that this is what he wanted, so this is what he gets. It’s better than nothing. He’s grateful, really. 

“We’re going out tonight,” Gabe tells him when he comes in to change. “Doing anything? You should come with.” 

Patrick wouldn’t want to go even if he hadn’t made plans with Greta. The only thing better than knowing that Pete sleeps around is watching it.

“I’m already going out,” Patrick replies. He digs through his backpack for a toothbrush and toothpaste and finds nothing except a pair of lavender Victoria’s Secret and a travel size bottle of hand lotion. “Do you have any gum?” 

“A girl?” Gabe asks. He hands Patrick the packet of chewing gum from his pocket. Cinnamon. 

“Yeah.” 

“Hmm,” is all Gabe says. 

Patrick takes her to a movie and lets her pick, and buys her Swedish Fish and popcorn for himself and holds her tiny hand through a rerun of _Witness._ His hands feel thick and clumsy, and Patrick squeezes her shoulder and expects her bones to crumble. 

“Sorry the movie was so weird,” Patrick says just outside the theater. It’s late, and most of the cars are gone from the parking lot. “I completely forgot how weird that movie is, I’m sorry I suggested it.” 

She laughs. “It’s fine, it’s a cute story— uh, going to see it, not the movie.” 

Patrick smiles at her, sitting in the dark car, and Greta leans over the center console and kisses him. Patrick holds her face in his hands, and she still tastes of Swedish Fish and her lip gloss sticks to Patrick’s tongue. She moves his hand carefully to her breast and Patrick inhales through his nose and thinks, _I like this, I like this, I like this,_ like a mantra. Greta kisses him until the rearview window is cloudy and the car radiator is unbearable, and Patrick tucks her hair behind her ears and carefully asks, “Do you want to get something to eat somewhere, or we can get a room, or—?”

“Patrick,” she says softly, sweetly. “You don’t seem that into this. It’s okay, I still had fun.” 

The immediate sense of relief that washes over him is quickly engulfed by the twisting feeling in his ribs. “Okay,” Patrick tells her. “I’m sorry, I’m just a little tired.” 

“We can go out another night, don’t worry about it.” 

She’s so sweet, and so much _girl,_ and Patrick tells himself he wants it, but when he drops her off at her hotel for the night, Patrick watches cars pass in the reflection of her window and thinks that he would have backed out eventually, and probably while naked. Greta had taken the easy way out and he’s grateful; he doesn’t want Greta, and he doesn’t want girls, or boys for that matter, he wants—? 

“You’re back early,” Pete tells him. He’s reading, legs folded under him, and Patrick wants to collapse into the pillows next to him and bury his face in Pete’s hair.

“What did you do?” Patrick snaps instead, angry. 

“What?” Pete snaps back. “What the fuck are you talking about? I’ve been here all night.” 

“You—!” Patrick starts, before he catches himself. Pete stares at him with wide eyes, in disbelief and itching for a fight. Patrick can’t handle Pete’s skin pressed to his right now, too close and itchy and exactly what Patrick has been craving for the entire night. It’s an act of self-deprecation when Patrick says, defeated, “Nevermind— why didn’t you go out with Gabe?” 

“I don’t know,” Pete replies. He closes the book on his lap. “You weren’t going? What movie did you see?” 

“Witness,” Patrick tells him.

Pete grimaces lightly before he asks, “Want to watch it again?”

Patrick shoves his cold toes up the back of Pete’s shirt for most of the movie, and when Pete’s finally had enough, he grabs Patrick by the bicep and shoves Patrick’s nose into the crack between the couch cushions. Patrick laughs and scratches at Pete’s forearm with blunt fingernails, and Pete presses his mouth to Patrick’s ear and murmurs, “Didn’t get your dick wet, did you?” 

“Nope,” Patrick replies smugly. The words taste like the back of a stamp and feel like a mouth full of sand. “Maybe you could _help me_ with that.”

2008

All considering, Patrick does a spectacular job of pretending he likes her. 

“Can I borrow your toothbrush?” Pete asks him, nervous and rushing out the door to meet her for dinner. They have reservations for Valentine’s Day, somewhere fancy, and Patrick is staying in, with a box of sugary cereal and a credit card. 

Patrick wrinkles his nose and assumes that he’s had Pete’s tongue in his mouth too many times to debate about the toothbrush. “I don’t care,” he says finally. “Just put it back when you’re done.” 

Patrick burns his eyes with his laptop in bed, contemplates getting off alone, and finds himself thoroughly miserable. He sleeps away part of the evening and eventually decides on a movie.

Pete stumbles through the door around ten with a plastic bag. He glows slightly in the doorway and Patrick stares at him with soft eyes and asks, “How was your night?”

“Got a little drunk,” Pete tells him. “It felt weird. I brought you dinner.” He flings himself across Patrick’s duvet, squints at the screen of Patrick’s MacBook, and announces, “I drink your milkshake!” 

Patrick’s heart must skip beats in multiples of two. He laughs and touches Pete’s chest, the button on his shirt pocket. “Stop bullying me, Daniel,” Patrick murmurs, lips pressed to the corner of Pete’s mouth. It’s a _thank you for dinner, thank you for not sleeping with her,_ soft and weighted with exhaustion, and Pete wraps strong fingers around the back of Patrick’s thighs and pulls their hips together, and it’s _let’s skip dinner, fuck me now._

Breathless in bed shortly after, Pete touches Patrick’s chin on his chest with gentle fingers, and says. “I like her. I’m trying not to fuck it up.” 

“This isn’t fucking it up?” Patrick asks. He’s smiling, and Pete can hear it in his voice and laughs. The fingers of Pete’s other hand play with the soft hairs at the back of Patrick’s skull, and Patrick is minutes from comatose. 

“Nothing about you is fucking it up,” Pete tells him. Patrick kisses his neck, his collarbone, his chest, and feels his own chest smolder. 

It’s a little like dropping a smoking car off the end of the dock and letting it sink. It’s still burning, somewhere, internally, and it explodes in time, but maybe it’s better under twelve feet of salt water. It poisons something deep.

2009 

It’s a dreary day, warm but pouring rain, and they’ve wasted the day between a delirious and saccharine round of morning sex, and on the verge of choking each other the rest of the day.

At the end of the day, dripping wet from the shower, Patrick reaches for his towel in the suffocating humidity of the bathroom and says, with an air of disbelief, “I really think I’m done. I really cannot fucking do this anymore.” 

Pete makes a strangled noise, like a scoff, and Patrick gives him a smile too sweet to be honest and hands him the damp towel. Pete sees right through it. 

“You’re being selfish,” Pete tells him. The bathroom floor is soaking wet, and Patrick pulls on sweatpants and a worn crew neck with shaking arms. “You don’t care about the band, and you don’t care about me.” 

Patrick slams the bathroom door closed and Pete shoves his bare knee between the doorframe and the door and swallows a grimace— it’s going to bruise, soft and purple, and Pete can feel it already.

“ _Shit!_ ”

“Let me close the door.” 

“I don’t get— I don’t get this, can we talk?”

“Let me close the door.” 

Pete drops the towel wrapped around his chest to the floor only minutes later and watches Patrick’s lax body in bed closely. The room is cold and mostly dark, only illuminated by a singular streetlight on the sidewalk outside, and Pete shivers before he says, barely audible, “‘M sorry.” 

“Stop,” Patrick mutters. His face is pressed to the pillow, his voice soaked in sleep. 

Pete slides into bed then, and shoves his knee between Patrick’s legs. It hurts, Patrick’s thigh pressed to the growing bruise on the outside of Pete’s knee, but Pete won’t move, instead he buries his face in Patrick’s neck and tries to sleep. 

Pete startles awake at half past two and vomits, and sitting on the bathroom floor, still damp from the previous evening, Pete thinks that maybe it’s for the best that Patrick sleeps through the whole thing.

2010

Patrick sits at His kitchen island in boxers and a t-shirt, on the phone with a “publicity magician,” someone his manager told him to talk to, while He makes eggs. Patrick doesn’t remember His name, or refuses to say it, and it doesn’t matter in the end. 

“I don’t know,” the Magician says over the phone. “Tell them you’re gay, tell them you used to do softcore porn because you were broke, tell them women’s underwear helps you get off— I don’t care, make something up for fuck’s sake.”

How fucking transparent do you have to be, really, for someone to guess two out of three on the first try? Patrick’s phone lies on the counter, speaker on, and He gives Patrick a curious look and slides the plate across the counter. 

It’s the same look Patrick had been given when he’d stripped out of his dress pants the night of their first date and said, without explanation, “Can we take this slow?” 

“I’m not going to lie,” Patrick tells the Magician. “That’s just— it’s stupid. What happens when they find out it’s a lie?”

“Who gives a shit?” 

Patrick sits on it, fuming, all week. He wants to go out for Valentine’s Day, but Patrick resists going Sunday, so they get reservations for Friday night. Patrick doesn’t want to get a cab, doesn’t want to drink, so He picks him up in His red CTS. He also wears a gold Breitling and Kurkdjian and hands the waitstaff His gold credit card and a fifty with the cheque with practiced confidence. Patrick’s biggest complaint is that He isn’t funny. 

After most of a bottle of rosé and a cigarette on the patio, the valet hands Him the keys and opens the door, and Patrick climbs into the passenger seat of the Cadi. He touches Patrick’s thigh from the driver’s side and there’s salad dressing on His white shirt and Patrick slams the door and is hit with an immediate wave of desperately wishing he was alone.

“I thought it was good,” He says. “I had fun.” 

Patrick’s heart is a sudden time bomb contained in his ribcage, ticking away the seconds, but he leans across the console and kisses Him. “The food was good,” Patrick murmurs between quick kisses. “Can I get a raincheck on the sex?” 

“Sure.” He checks his hair in the tiny mirror of the car visor, and says, debatably joking, “Hey, were you kidding about the women’s underwear thing last weekend, or—”

It’s the wrong wire to cut. No one said bomb diffusion wasn’t an art. 

The realization is abrupt, but Patrick thinks he gets it, the realization his therapist has been pushing at him for the past year— why sex with Him feels a little like a punishment in the aftermath, why sex with Pete feels like liberation, why the panties stuffed in the back corner of his dresser are strangely comforting. Patrick slams his head back against the headrest of the car seat and fumbles with the seatbelt in a blind and raging hysteria.

Patrick’s bitter laugh is dislodged from somewhere deep beneath his ribs. “No,” he snaps. “I’m not doing that.” 

He laughs and glances at Patrick from the corner of his eye, hands still in his hair. “I’m not passing judgement, it’s really not—”

“No!” Patrick snaps again. “How fucking presumptuous can you be? Just because I’m short and blond and try to dress well doesn’t mean I want a dick up my ass every weekend, doesn’t mean I’m gonna let you dress me in whatever you fucking want. It’s so fucking emasculating!” 

“No one said—”

“I’m so fucking done,” Patrick spits. “I’m just fucking going home. I’m sorry.” The door handle pops in his hand with a satisfactory click and Patrick breathes in the best of LA’s fresh air and watches the white stripes of the parking lot bend and crack.

Home, as it turns out, is Pete’s guest bedroom. He calls Emily’s office and makes an appointment for the following Tuesday and cries in the cab to Pete’s voicemail, “Am I naive, or just fucking stupid? Is this what they do to everybody?”

He snivels himself to sleep in LA traffic and arrives on Pete’s doorstep with his blazer stuffed in his armpit and his shirt undone. He wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand and rings the doorbell. 

Pete opens the door and says, “It’s not you.”

“Assholes,” Patrick tells him hours later, his voice high and his head on Pete’s thigh. “All of them.”

Pete hums in response. There’s hockey on the television, the volume muted, and Pete doesn’t look down at his lap; instead he touches Patrick’s hair and says, unthinkingly,“Sweet boy,” and then, “You shouldn’t let them get to you.”

2011

Everything comes out eventually. Patrick vomits up how much he hates lying to everyone in his life, how angry he gets when Pete says things they both know he doesn’t mean, and the recurring nightmare he has where Patrick runs over Pete’s fingers with his Buick. 

“He will say that he’d move somewhere else, ‘cause I hate it here, or like, that we could figure it out, but like— it’s not really true, you know? He’s just telling me what he thinks I want him to say.” 

“But don’t you do that, too?” Emily asks in response. 

Patrick tells him he doesn’t care who Pete goes out with, that he’s over things that Pete said or did years ago, that he has other people to fuck with when Pete’s not around. Patrick tells Emily, with a nasty curl of his lip, that it’s different.

Emily tells him to see other people. 

She has dark hair that reminds him of Pete and she’s funny. They fuck on the first date and Patrick slides his hand into the front of her lace thong and prays she can’t feel his heart pounding irregularly against his ribs. She’s fun and genuinely likes him, thinks he’s sweet, and Patrick looks up at her over an expensive dinner and realizes that after months of dinners and movies and sleepovers, he still feels the same way as the day they first met— just nervous and hoping to get laid. Patrick breaks up with her the week before Valentine’s Day. He figures it’s better than waiting.

2012 

A year later and they’re honeymooning. They write and write and they don’t tell anyone they’re writing and Patrick thinks as long as they’re fucking, they’re fine. He barely leaves Pete’s LA house anymore— Patrick shows up one Friday night with a pizza in one hand and a duffel in the other and they grind against each other on Pete’s stupid white leather couch and Patrick doesn’t leave. Patrick jacks him off in the shower and they crawl into bed together and sleep until noon and Patrick still doesn’t leave. They write from noon until midnight and Pete fingers him propped up against the downstairs bathroom sink and Patrick doesn’t leave for a week. 

Pete finally kicks him out when he flies out to New York for a label event, and they’re on the phone two nights later making plans to do it all over again. 

“That’s Valentine’s Day,” Patrick tells him over the phone. He stares at his ass in the mirror and contemplates sending a picture to Pete. 

“I know,” Pete tells him lightly. 

Patrick matches his tone and says, innocently, “What, you want to go out?”

“Do you know what year it is?” Pete replies. He sounds amused.

“I’ll just come over.” 

Patrick thinks about it the rest of the week. He feels itchy, and Pete barely texts him, so he does what he shouldn’t do, and takes a picture of his naked ass in the mirror, flushed and damp from the shower, with his cell phone and sends it to Pete. 

_Remind me I bought you something,_ Pete texts back. Patrick bites his lip and stares at the notification and feels something primal grow in his chest. 

Maybe it’s an acute case of Stockholm Syndrome, or it’s just a total fucking game, but Patrick wears his most expensive coat and lets Pete pull him through the door with his thumbs hooked in the belt loops of Patrick’s tightest jeans. They order take out and watch Risky Business on Pete’s laptop on the kitchen counter, and Pete pulls Patrick’s mouth to his while the credits roll and says, “I’ll go get my gift.” 

Pete hands him the box wrapped in creme-colored tissue paper and Patrick already knows what’s in it. Dark blue silk panties, tiny bows on each of the hips, and obviously expensive. 

“They’re for me,” Pete tells him. “Or— they’re for you, but they’re really for me.” 

_They’re for me_ , Patrick thinks. “Let me change.” 

Patrick makes a show of stripping out of the panties in Pete’s upstairs guest bedroom an hour later and Pete eye-fucks him like he loves him and Patrick laughs and crawls into Pete’s lap and tries to ignore the burning humiliation in his chest. 

Pete fucks him hard fast from behind and pins Patrick’s wrists over his head against the pillows. Patrick holds the panties in his hands, runs his fingers over silk and lace trim while he drools on the pillow, and thinks with equal pleasure and hatred that Pete makes him feel sexy and fun and enticing, even if he’s wearing women’s underwear under his street clothes and getting clandestine blow jobs in club bathrooms. Pete adores him, so Patrick arches his back, pushes his hips backwards, and _whines_ , and Pete comes on the same breath.

2013

When the band gets back together, Pete buys them all something for Valentine’s Day. Patrick’s has a small pink envelope taped to the back of it, and Pete pulls him close, his elbow around Patrick’s neck and his mouth to Patrick’s ear, and whispers, “Open it later.” 

Patrick opens it later, standing over his kitchen island with a pizza box and a homemade cocktail on the counter. A second glass sits next to his, two paper plates, and a dog bowl at the end of the island. Two tickets to a re-showing of Witness at an independent theater.

“Did you open it?” Pete asks him minutes later, from the hallway doorframe. He’s damp from the shower, sweatpants hung low across his hips. 

“Mmm,” Patrick replies. He fingers the tickets in his hands and watches Pete pull his sweatshirt over his shoulders.

Patrick sucks him off in the bathroom when the movie ends and spits Pete’s come back into his mouth when Pete drags him back off the floor to kiss him. 

“You’re disgusting,” Pete tells him, dark hand wrapped around Patrick’s cock. The angle is awkward, Pete’s hand shoved in the front of Patrick’s jeans, but Pete bites at his neck and Patrick grinds his erection against Pete’s softening cock, slick with spit, and comes on a stunted breath.

“Admit you like it,” Patrick growls, laughing, his hand wrapped around the back of Pete’s neck.

“You’re disgusting, and I like it so much,” Pete tells him again.

2014

_Love,_ Patrick thinks, amidst chocolate and fine pastries and a hoard of customers in down coats and silver jewelry, _is a fucking trap._

Pete stands over the table in the corner of the small coffee shop and deposits his phone, his wallet, his sunglasses on the table. He gestures at the line of customers and tells him cautiously, “You should get something for breakfast.” 

Patrick swallows and rubs at his face and says, “Yeah.” 

“Do you want me to get you something?”

“No.” 

“Can you watch my stuff?”

“Yeah.” 

Pete pulls his debit card from his wallet and touches Patrick’s shoulder unthinkingly before he gets in line for coffee. Patrick shrugs him off and stares at the table and refuses to look at the way Pete fits in line perfectly, like he’s made for overpriced coffee and personal advertising and a celebrity culture that makes Patrick gag if he thinks about it too hard. 

Pete’s phone buzzes on the table and Patrick watches it closely before, against his better judgement, he flips the phone over and reads the latest notification. There’s boundaries, but they’re flexible. 

_Love you. See you tonight_

Nothing happens. Every bleached-blonde woman in dark jeans continues her phone call, the barista swipes cards and delivers smiles with each scalding cup of coffee sold, and a dog in a jacket walks by the window. Patrick watches Pete order his coffee and slides the phone to the other side of the table with apathetic fingers. 

“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” Pete asks. “Are you okay?” 

“No,” Patrick says. and then asks, voice level, “Do you have plans tonight?” 

Pete shakes his head, no, and hands Patrick a paper bag. “I got you something anyways.” 

Combined, they are as good at honesty as Pete is at subtlety, piss poor, really fucking bad. Patrick stares at him for a moment, all cold eyes and his teeth in his lip, before he snatches the bag from Pete’s outstretched hands and mutters, “Thanks.” 

Patrick keeps his teeth in his lip for the rest of the day, chews a hole in his flesh like he chews Pete out for being late, for lying to him, for everything else. He leans against the window in the car home and insists to himself for the n-th time that this is what he wants, so this is what he gets. The exhaustion sets in and settles to his bones as he lets his eyes flick to every passing streetlight and ignores his phone vibrating in the pocket of his jeans.

He eats a crushed granola bar and calls it dinner, shoves most of his clothes back in his bag, and showers. The water is too hot or too cold, and the water pressure stings, and when he turns off the shower, Patrick trades in the shower stream for the stinging realization that there’s nothing left to do but sit on the bathroom floor and be miserable. 

The tears are hot and humiliating even as he sits on the tile alone. There’s no audience, no one to perform alligator tears for, no one to make a scene in front of, and Patrick wipes at his eyes with his sweatshirt sleeve and tries to make a pattern with the colored mosaic on the floor. There’s a piece of glitter stuck to the tile in the corner of the bathroom and Patrick picks at it with his fingernail. It doesn’t come up. 

_How fucking LA,_ Patrick thinks. LA feels like paying off a debt. He sold his soul to get this famous, so he makes his bed in his personal Hell and lies in it.

2015 

There’s a show Valentine’s Day weekend, and they don’t share hotel rooms anymore— or they don’t, but _they_ do, and it’s barely intentional. Patrick buys the panties online the week before, sky blue and all lace this time, and thinks, _fuck it,_ because what else does he have to spend his money on than his mortgage and women’s underwear?

He doesn’t regret it the week later, when Pete pulls the panties to the side and slides into him, fucks him on the bathroom counter of the hotel, sweet and slow, and Patrick rolls against him and listens to Pete spill filth into the curve of his ear, things he only says when they’re fuck drunk and Patrick is too far gone to call him out on it. 

_God, you’re so beautiful, all I’ve ever wanted, fuck._

Pete watches himself in the bathroom mirror over Patrick’s shoulder as he sucks a bruise into the soft spot behind Patrick’s ear and Patrick writhes against his cock. 

When they’re finished, Pete slides two fingers into him, slick with too much lube and Pete’s own come, and Patrick drops his head against the mirror and makes a strangled noise. 

“Think you can get off again?” Pete asks him, voice thick and quiet against Patrick’s earlobe. His hair is damp with sweat and stuck to his temples and Patrick arches against his fingertips and gasps. “I want you to.” 

“Yeah,” Patrick replies. “Yeah, I want to.” 

Patrick comes on a sob and collapses into Pete’s chest a short time later, and Pete pulls the panties over Patrick’s soft hips and tosses them into the trash without thinking.

2016 

Two nights before Valentine’s Day, and Pete kisses him filthy between the white sheets of the Manhattan Marlton. 

“The most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen, seriously,” Pete mumbles, mouth hot against the underside of Patrick’s chin. He tweaks a pink nipple and Patrick squirms and laughs. 

“You’re fucking full of yourself,” Patrick whispers. “And you’re full of shit.” 

Patrick’s fingernails trace his spine and Pete hums against his neck. “Full of myself, yes. Full of shit, absolutely not.” 

His chest to Pete’s, Patrick can feel Pete’s heart pound against his in perfect synchronicity. They’re quiet for a moment, and Pete squeezes his sides and says, “I have a crush on you.”

Patrick laughs. “I know,” he replies, and feels Pete’s grin against his neck. Outside the window and six floors down, a siren screams. Pete pulls the curtains closed and flips the switch on the radiator and pulls the sheets over Patrick's shoulders. 

"See you tomorrow," Pete says. 

Saturday morning, Patrick watches him shave and brush his teeth in the mirror, chin tucked neatly over Pete’s right shoulder. “Every time,” Patrick whispers thickly, his hands stuffed in the front pockets of Pete’s sweatpants. “Every fucking time.” 

“Star-crossed, baby,” Pete says in return, and spits in the sink. 

**Author's Note:**

> @battylite on Tumblr.


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